‘Baby Hope’ Identified as Angelica, but Questions Remain

After 22 years of being known as Baby Hope, the slain child found in a cooler on the side of a highway can now be called by her name: Angelica.

The identity of the child had been unknown since her remains were found in 1991, dumped near the Henry Hudson Parkway in Upper Manhattan. But after a break in the case this summer, detectives were able to determine the identity of the child’s mother and of Baby Hope, who was 4 when she was killed.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation confirmed the girl’s first name, which was first reported by The New York Post on Thursday.

The identification provided a long-hoped-for jolt to the investigation, which had been stalled but never forgotten by the detectives who worked on the case over the years. In the months since the breakthrough, detectives from the cold case Squad have interviewed the mother and other relatives. But they are still searching for the girl’s father and several of his family members. Investigators believe he may still be living in the city.

Indeed, even as new information created new avenues in the search for answers, an arrest was not imminent, two law enforcement officials said. Before making one, the officials said, investigators from the Police Department and Manhattan district attorney’s office must engage in the laborious process of piecing together the life of the child in the years before her death.

Investigators characterized the case now as being like discovering a dead body with an ID in the wallet: you know who died, but you don’t know anything about who did it, or why. “That opens up a whole new direction of the investigation and there are numerous things that have to be done,” said Joseph A. Pollini, a retired lieutenant who commanded the Police Department’s cold case squad from 1996 to 2002. “Now they’re much more focused. The fact that they have an identification of the baby, they know who the mother is, they know who the father is. They’ll do interviews with the relatives, look back at records to see if there were any records of abuse filed.”

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Detectives are currently working to build a family tree and are conducting interviews along each branch. While some details have emerged, others remain unknown. Based on the interviews that investigators have conducted so far, they believe Angelica’s father immigrated from Mexico and at some point lived in Queens, according to one official. The couple split up and the father took Angelica against her mother’s will, the official said. She lived in her father’s residence for several months before she was killed. She was asphyxiated, investigators had earlier determined, but they are still uncertain about where she died.

The investigation was jump-started by a tip — one of hundreds to emerge in the case over the years — that came in around the anniversary of when Angelica’s remains were found in the cooler in Washington Heights. The police were discussing the case and handing out fliers in the neighborhood, repeating a hopeful but until then mostly fruitless tactic to generate leads in the case.

This year’s effort jogged the memory of a woman. She phoned the police, recalling a distant conversation in which another woman spoke of a younger sister who had been murdered.

Similarities to the Baby Hope case led detectives to track down the woman whose sister had been slain and, using DNA testing techniques not available in 1991, to identify Baby Hope’s mother.

For Mr. Pollini, such a sudden disclosure after many years is not unheard-of. “People think that time works against you, and that’s true in terms of the preservation of the evidence,” he said. “But sometimes, as time goes by, people come forward. They’ve been holding it back for years and years and years and they get to release it.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2013, on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Baby Hope’ Identified as Angelica, but Questions Remain. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe